If you're like me, you run libvirt on a headless server and look at VM consoles with virt-viewer. You also probably see the following warnings:

Gtk-Message: 14:08:40.348: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 14:08:40.348: Failed to load module "pk-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 14:08:40.477: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 14:08:40.477: Failed to load module "pk-gtk-module"

The solution is as follows

yum install PackageKit-gtk3-module libcanberra-gtk3

intel drivers on CentOS 6

Furthermore, to get X working nicely on a Shuttle DX30 with CentOS 6, you have to install a newer intel driver:

yum install libpciaccess-devel.x86_64 xorg-x11-server-devel.x86_64 libXfont-devel.x86_64 libXfont2-devel.x86_64
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel
cd xf86-video-intel
git checkout d39197bb10b7d88cb4c456e7a5e8d34c1dc6eeaf
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
sudo mv /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so.ORIG
sudo rsync -a ./src/.libs/intel_drv.so /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so

(Copied from https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=64780)

Death To Proprietary Drivers

I was working on a CentOS 6 install for work and figured "hey, I should upgrade Mustang to the latest version." Normally this means

yum upgrade
shutdown -r now

Of course that didn't work; Mustang has an APU and uses a proprietary driver from AMD for X.org. I pretty much never use Mustang's console so I didn't notice this for 2 days, when my wife complained about not being able to watch Lost.

After much futzing, I find the error message: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so: undefined symbol: GlxInitVisuals2D. This means AMD's driver is doing something stupid. I of course can't compile it nor fix it. I tried to download the latest driver, but that refused to install. Curse swear, google google and then I found it.

rpm -ivh http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/elrepo-release-6-6.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
rpm -e fglrx64_p_i_c-12.104-1 --nodeps
yum -y install fglrx-x11-drv-32bit fglrx-x11-drv kmod-fglrx
aticonfig --initial

First line installs ELRepo, which you might already have. Second line removes the previous drivers, which conflict with the new ones. The --nodeps is because Adobe really wants OpenGL installed. Third line is the important one, it installs the new drivers and does all the magic to get them working. Yes, the X.org driver needs to install a kernel module. Last line just makes sure that Xorg.conf is set up properly. I'd been playing around in it to try to get it to work.

So Death to Proprietary Drivers! And long live the guys at ELRepo!

CentOS X .xsession

Further annoyances with CentOS 6. It now uses .xsession as the last resort. The work around is to add the following lines to /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession. Put them just after the line that sources /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common

if [ -x "$HOME/.xsession" ]; then
    exec -l $SHELL -c "$CK_XINIT_SESSION $SSH_AGENT $HOME/.xsession"
fi

Yes, there's probably a smarter way of doing it. But I don't want to bother tracking it down.

CentOS 6 X problems

First off, 6.4 came out and I didn't notice.

Second off, while setting up my new Laptop (Nicko, an IBM t61) for development, I managed to mess up Xorg. The error messages are

[ 25469.587] [dix] Could not init font path element catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d, removing from list!
[ 25469.587] [dix] Could not init font path element built-ins, removing from list!
[ 25469.587] 
Fatal server error:
[ 25469.587] could not open default font 'fixed'

A quick fix is just yum -y upgrade. But given this would push me to 6.4 (aka a lot of downloading), a smaller fix was required. I found the following got the job done. I strongly suspect the libXfont is all that is required. YMMV

wget ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/6.4/os/x86_64/Packages/xorg-x11-drv-modesetting-0.5.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-drv-modesetting-0.5.0-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install pixman pixman-devel libXfont -y
sudo yum groupinstall Desktop -y

A mixed bag

I ordered a BlacX SATA/IDE/USB docking station today. Should have bought one back when I first discovered them. Would have made all the farting around with Corey a lot less painful.

In other news, I discovered that getting xterm to use TrueType fonts is as simple as -fa NAME-PT. As in:

xterm -r -fa Consolas-17

Consolas, if you didn't know, is a nice little monospaced font that MS commissioned, tuned to LCD screens. The previous link downloads a bloody useless setup.exe. So I downloaded the .ttf from elsewhere.

Also, you might be interested in this review of programming fonts from 2007. Though he seems to think that 11pt is legible.

Finally, a snippet to get the current X resolution. I needed this to adjust the font size based on resolution. My users want the terminal to fill the screen.

read prop Xsize Ysize < <(xprop -notype -root 32cc ' $0 $1\n' _NET_DESKTOP_GEOMETRY)

echo "${DISPLAY:-Display} is ($Xsize,$Ysize)"

If you didn't know about Process Substitution you do now.